Stanley et Livingstone

This is an interesting movie for a couple of reasons. It suffers from coming out in 1939, which may be the great year of movie releases in history. Its history might be quite different if it was not buried amongst the movie icons that also came out that year.

The first thing I found worth noting was how Hollywood converted the basic western format into an African safari. You could see/hear so many western standard devices as you viewed the film. It was once stated that all movies can be converted into a cowboy movie. This movie was a very short trip in that respect.

The second, and best part, was the whole historical concept of the story, despite the difference from the actual story, which were so eloquently detailed below. The story of this journey, along with the journey of Lewis and Clark, or one-armed Capt. John Wesley Powell through the southwest, especially the Grand Canyon, make up some of the greatest adventures of modern times.

All in all, this movie is a good adventure.

A brash young newspaper reporter is sent into the unexplored regions of Central Africa to find a highly revered missionary-explorer who has seemingly disappeared. This is the account of their meeting - a fateful encounter which would not only transform the young man, but would profoundly change the history of Africa itself. This is the story of STANLEY AND LIVINGSTONE.

Here is one of the excellent adventure films from the golden year of 1939 & it is a very enjoyable evening's entertainment. More than just that, though. It is rare for Hollywood movies of the period to show actual spiritual epiphanies in the lives of their protagonists. That STANLEY AND LIVINGSTONE makes that significant attempt only adds to its prestige.

Spencer Tracy does an admirable job as Stanley, who - in the movie, at least - is basically moved or motivated by the whims of others. The two men who control his destiny, his publisher and Livingstone, could not be more different; yet each help prepare him for a profound spiritual turnabout in his life. Stanley's infatuation with a pretty English woman he meets in Zanzibar is also destined to lead only to inspiration, not love. Tracy's great skill as an actor helps make all these changes in Stanley's life clear to the audience. His delivery of one of the most famous greetings in history - `Dr. Livingstone, I presume?' - is perfect, spoken with just the right mixture of relief, awe & absolute weariness.

Walter Brennan has great fun with the role of an old Indian scout sent along to protect Stanley. Brennan - like Tracy, already a double Oscar winner - effortlessly walks away with several of his scenes. His colorful performance is a good counterpoint to Tracy's more mannered interpretation.

Best of all is the quiet, understated performance of Sir Cedric Hardwicke as the saintly Livingstone. With his comely, calm voice, Sir Cedric, who does not appear until late in the film, easily captures the attention of the viewer. He makes his character come alive and helps us understand why Livingstone was so important and revered a figure in the 19th Century. He is the very picture of vital, vibrant, muscular Christianity. Leading his native converts in a spirited rendition of `Onward! Christian Soldiers,' Sir Cedric gives the film its most delightful moments. (This rousing hymn, with words by the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, was not set to music by Sir Arthur Sullivan until 1872, so it's not possible Livingstone could have sung it in 1871. A small quibble - it's still a great scene.)

The rest of the fine cast - Richard Greene, Charles Coburn, Henry Hull & especially Henry Travers - offer splendid support in small roles.

To their great credit, 20th Century Fox actually sent a crew to British East Africa to film authentic safari footage which was then interspersed with shots of the actors. These on-location scenes, under the supervision of chief white hunter Captain A. J. Klein, add a great deal of veracity to the movie, providing views of natives, wildlife & scenery not possible to replicate in a Hollywood studio. (Some of the resulting rear projection shots, with Tracy or Brennan superimposed over the real African film, are rather annoying in their fakery, but this is a very small irritation.)

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As STANLEY AND LIVINGSTONE deals with the lives of two men who had a profound impact upon the Victorian world, a little check of the actual historical facts is in order.

David Livingstone was born to a poor Scots family in 1813. One of seven children, Livingston's family lived in a single room atop a tenement for laborers. Although working 14-hour days in a cotton mill, he eked out the time to educate himself. Becoming a committed Christian early in life, by the age of 20 he had determined to become a medical missionary. After studying in Glasglow, he was sent by the London Missionary Society, at the age of 27, to South Africa in 1841.

Upon arriving, Livingstone walked the 600 miles to his mission station on the edge of the Kalahari Desert. He spent the next eight years very hard at work there and at his new mission at the headwaters of the Limpopo River, marrying a missionary's daughter and beginning to raise a young family. Then, feeling God wanted a change in his life, Livingstone began to explore the interior of the continent. If proper maps could be made of this vast unknown territory, he reasoned, Africa could be opened to missionaries, educators, scientists & geographers - all enhancing civilization, spreading Christianity & bringing about an end to the hideous Arab slave trade.

Thus began a life of trekking that would take Livingstone over 29,000 miles. In 1849 & again in 1851 (this time with his family) Livingstone crossed the Kalahari, making contact with the natives of the Zambezi region. Sending his family back to Britain in 1852, Livingstone spent the next four years trying to find a connection between the Zambezi and either African coast, in the hopes of opening up the interior to civilizing commerce. Although he failed in his quest, Livingstone became the first European to traverse the entire width of the Southern continent and to see the tremendous falls on the Zambezi, which he named Victoria Falls.

Returning to England in 1856 to much laud & acclaim, he was given an audience with the Queen and met with enthusiastic crowds wherever he appeared. His book, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, was a bestseller.

Back to Africa in 1858, (with an official appointment as Her Majesty's Consul for the East Coast of Africa) Livingstone's next expedition - up the Zambezi by steamboat - was met with tragedy. Members of the party, including Mrs. Livingstone in 1862, died of malaria and the river proved ultimately unnavigable. Livingstone was ordered home to London in 1864.

Livingstone remained a hero to the public and the publication of his new book, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambezi and Its Tributaries, only enhanced his reputation. In 1866, under the auspices of the Royal Geographic Society and with the new appointment as British Consul for Central Africa, Livingstone began his last great quest - the search for the true source of the Nile. Spending the next seven years in fruitless wandering, and appalled by the sufferings of the slaves he encountered, Livingstone was broken in health and out of communication with England for nearly five years. There was enormous public interest as to his fate.

It was at this point that Stanley tracked him down, in the village of Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, in the Autumn of 1871. After exploring near the Lake together, Stanley left in March of 1872. Livingstone stayed behind, but continued his search, although in very ill health. He died while kneeling at prayer, on May 1, 1873, at the age of only 60. As per his request, his heart was reverently buried in Africa. His porters carried his mummified body nearly a thousand miles to the sea, where it was returned to London. On April 18, 1874, Dr. David Livingstone was buried in Westminster Abbey. His epitaph, which includes a verse from St. John's Gospel, reads `Brought by faithful hands over land and sea, here rests David Livingstone, missionary, traveller, philanthropist, born March 19, 1813, at Blantyre, Lanarkshire, died May 1, 1873, at Chitambo's village, Ulala. Other sheep have I which are not of this fold; them also I must bring.'

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Stanley was not, as many believe, American. Neither was he English, as the movie oddly insists. In fact he was Welsh and he was born John Rowlands in 1841, to unmarried parents. After a wretchedly humiliating youth spent in a workhouse, he sailed as a cabin boy in 1859 to New Orleans. Taking the name of an early benefactor, Henry Stanley managed to fight on both sides of the American Civil War before being discharged for dysentery.

After spending some time on Atlantic merchant ships, Stanley cultivated his flair for writing and became a newspaper correspondent in 1866, traveling with the U. S. Cavalry in its conflicts with Midwest Indians. In 1867 Stanley joined the New York Herald and soon accompanied the British in their successful excursion against the self-proclaimed Emperor Theodore II of Ethiopia.

From 1869 to 1871, Stanley journeyed for the Herald to Suez, the Crimea, Persia & India before undertaking the assignment to find Livingstone. (It was on this expedition that Stanley began the harsh, often cruel punishment of African resistance which would stain his reputation.) The film is correct in depicting the British geographical hierarchy's disinclination to initially believe his claims as to finding the old doctor. Stanley's 1872 book, How I Found Livingstone became a bestseller and answered his critics.

After reporting on the 1873 British assault against the Ashanti Kingdom on the Gold Coast, Stanley began his most ambitious & dangerous expedition yet: to fill in the blank spaces left by Livingstone's death in the knowledge of Central African topography. From 1874 until 1877, Stanley traveled across the entire width of the continent from East to West, beginning in Zanzibar and finishing up at the mouth of the Congo. In betwixt, he circumnavigated & explored Lakes Victoria & Tanganyika, and traveled the lengths of the Lualaba & Congo Rivers. He survived a horrendous cannibal attack, virulent disease and the drowning & desertion of many of his native bearers. He once again showed his ruthlessness in dealing with defiance, at one point shooting dozens of villagers that showed hostility. Of the 359 individuals that started the trip with Stanley, only 108 finished it. His 1878 book, Through The Dark Continent, answered many questions in European minds about African geography. The major colonizing powers were not slow to take notice.

In 1879, Stanley undertook the interests of Belgian King Leopold II and spent 5 years helping to open the Congo region to commerce, as described in his 1885 book, The Congo And The Founding Of The Free State.

Working for the British Crown, Stanley undertook the dangerous mission in 1888-89 to resupply & rescue the British Pasha of the Egyptian Sudan, who was surrounded & threatened by the fundamentalist Islamic forces of the mad Khalifa. This assignment, although with great loss of life, proved successful, as Stanley described in yet another book, In Darkest Africa, 1890.

Having lived through enough thrills for ten men, Stanley married in 1890 and began a series of lecture tours. In 1895 he entered Parliament and made his last tour of Africa in 1897, which resulted in his final book, Through South Africa, 1898.

Henry Morton Stanley was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1899 for his services to Britain. Sir Henry died in 1904 & was also buried in Westminster Abbey.

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Together, Livingstone & Stanley hold the greatest responsibility for the exploration of Central Africa. The knowledge they gave to the world promoted Christianity in the region and helped to crush the slave trade. They also initiated the Scramble for Africa, in which the major European powers all took a chunk of the continent for themselves. This huge colonial land grab was completed by the time of Stanley's death. However, Livingstone's beneficent treatment of the Africans and his championing of their rights in no small measure helped directly influence their eventual nationalistic drives for self-determination & independence.

Stanley and Livingstone is maybe not the most accurate historical movie presented,but nevertheless a very interesting experience. Spencer Tracy is very good in this one,portraying his character in the naturalistic style he was famed for.Cedric Hardwicke is Dr. Livingstone conveying the concern and love for humanity as a dedicated missionary would have.The treatment of the Africans in this movie would feel very racist today,but I think the attitudes of white supremacy was very true to life since this movie is set in the 1870's. Walter Brennan's comic supporting part is a bit annoying and Charles Coburn's British newspaper editor is a caricature.The African footage is spectacular,especially the native attack on Stanley's caravan. This movie is also crying out for a DVD release

If any of you have read some of my reviews of other films, you'll note that I've said that Jim Bowie of all the colorful frontier characters in American history gets the biggest whitewash in films. The man was a notorious scoundrel and half of this film is devoted to another scoundrel.

Henry M. Stanley was just such a scoundrel. The film does not go at all into his later life as a paid shill of King Leopold of Belgium and his brutally administered regime in the Belgian Congo. Nor does it mention when he came to America, he enlisted and deserted from both sides of the Civil War.

Stanley found his calling as a reporter for the New York Herald where on the strength of his reporting on the American Indian wars, editor James Gordon Bennett decided he was the guy to send to Africa and scoop the English papers in a search for famed missionary Dr. David Livingstone.

Whatever else he was, Stanley was a brave man and his explorations into Africa added considerable knowledge for the Caucasian world about that continent.

As for Livingstone, by all indications he was a Christian who did walk the walk in his beliefs in life and probably would have been aghast at Stanley's later activities with the Belgian Congo.

Spencer Tracy plays Stanley as if he was doing one of his roughneck characters who finds the piety of a Father Flanagan in the African jungle. Cedric Hardwicke is a very proper and pious David Livingstone. Hardwicke's portrayal is the truth and Tracy does put his characterization of Stanley across, false though it is in real life.

This was Spencer Tracy's only film away from MGM for the time he was under contract to them. It was for his former studio 20th Century Fox and he certainly never got as big a budget on his previous films with them except possibly Dante's Inferno.

Though the film takes incredible liberties with the facts, fans of Spencer Tracy might like this story of a scoundrel in search of a saint in the jungle.

I'm still waiting for this underrated gem to be put on DVD. I doubt if a lot people are familiar with this film, and that's a shame, and perhaps the reason it hasn't been put on disc. I remember being surprised how good it was the first time I saw it. I liked it even better the second time and even more on the third.

What's to like? Well, Spencer Tracy, to begin with. It's also interesting to see this true story about a man living in the heart of Africa in a time when few white men had ever gone to that continent. Livinstone (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) also was a good witness for his Christian faith, and even made a strong admirer out of partner and skeptic Stanley, played by Tracy.

Completing the fine cast in this film are Nancy Kelly (who looks beautiful), Walter Brennan and Charles Coburn.

The film could have been a spectacular visual one if it had been done in Technicolor, since the locations are in Africa, not some Hollywood set....but the back-and-white photography is still good. I'm not complaining. Great film.